Using Twitter to Sell Shit

I've just got into Twitter in a big way. I had it for ages and I would make the odd desultory tweet. And then I read about how wonderful it was to sell your books. The secret was to get huge huge lists of people. The only trouble with having 14,000 followers is how do you read all the Tweets they tweet?

One solution is to use lists. Twitter has a wonderful feature that you can assign people to lists. I have for example:

Horror - groups and things tweeting about horror movies, books, etc
Groups - writers groups,
Marketing - people giving cool tips about how to market books
Writers - lots of individual writers trying to sell their books to me.
Political - newpapers etc,.
Funny - what it says
etc

So I can read all writers, all marketeers and filter out the rest. Still 5000 marketeers is a lot of tweets. When it comes to writers, many of them mainly tweet about their books. I don't find these effective as many don't appeal - the odd ones do, but many I just end up muting. I bet they mute me too.

There are various email list readers such as Hootsuite 

Managing your lists can be an issue. I wish there was a clear drag and drop app to do this, but I have been using Twitter List Manager  because, although it looks a bit primitive, it lets you know who is in a list, which list they are in and also if they are NOT in a list.  There is a nicer looking one called Icotile which does support drag and drop. The only trouble with this is that from the mass sea of faces, which you can drag and drop (hooray!) you don't know who is already in a list or of they're not in a list and you don't know who the hell they are either. If they have their name on their icon/avatar that's good, but most don't so I've gone back to Twitter List Manager

I tend to try and send interesting and relevant articles I found and I have been using

Klout  and Buffer and also using the schedule feature on Hootsuite  and also finding things on Stumbleupon,   This absolutely works as I have been gaining droves of followers because I post such remarkably interesting stuff. I tend to be a little bit eclectic and I think for best effect you should try to be focused in what you post.

Probably don't post your stream of consciousness. No one really cares.

But, and here's the nub of it, what is the point of having 34,000 followers and following most of them back if they are muting you and you are muting them? Because you cannot read all that shit.

One way round it that cunning people have is follow people to get them to follow back then quickly unfollow them! Bastards. But there's a nifty app called Crowdfire which stops all that nonsense. It tells you who has unfollowed you and who doesn't follow you back.

But that's not enough. For example I sent out notice of my new audiobook reading  to my many hundred followers and when I checked the tweet activity, 17 people had seen it, none had clicked on it.

So what's the point in having a million Twitter follows whose tweets you don't read and they don't read yours either. It's not even onanism, at least that gets results for the onanist.

I think you're better off with a community of Tweeters whose stuff you read and they read yours.

What do you say?